Have you been seeing recently a lot of ads on online shopping sites? It is the effect of growing popularity of this mode of shopping. These ecommerce(Ecom) sites have changed the world of shopping in terms of the purchase, the timing and experience. Nowadays, the concept of buying jewelry or clothes needs no occasion and time. You can compare brands, competitors’ pricing, see reviews and write your own.

The online retailers are faced with the tough task of attracting customers and retaining them in an extremely competitive environment. To influence the customers’ decisions pricing, promotions & pressure can be used but will not be helpful in creating customer loyalty. Stating the why’s of your business, inspiring your customers and easing their way to transact with you helps you to win over your competitors and translates to customer loyalty. Here are a few tips for your ecommerce site.

Product Descriptions:

I was shopping for a wooden hair brush from Amazon. By looking at the product descriptions, which one do you think is useful in helping me decide?

Product 1:

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Product 2:

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Rewrite manufacturer descriptions if it is irrelevant and add more content. For a etailer like Amazon, it can be a huge effort for such small products but for small businesses, this would be the influencing point.

Extensive Product Info:

Adding more useful info, unique content, comments, videos and images not only help in conversions, but also help in SEO. The format in which you display the products and information also counts. Below are search results from Amazon and Flipkart for MP3 players. You can see that Flipkart has added info about the products and featured products at the side.

Amazon:

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Flipkart:

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Provide Useful Info:

Use keyword tools to look up for popular queries that people ask related to the products such as “ How to use” or “What to look for while buying” etc. Consider adding content related to such questions using a blog or within sections of the site.

Added Blogs:
People think that blogs influence the ecommerce visitors’ buying decisions. But frankly how many times have you read the blogs in the online shopping sites? Blogs attached to your website serves to aid the purpose of getting indexed by search engines. It will add traffic to your website where they learn about your business and help in bookmarking and sharing the link as useful or interesting articles.

But don’t hide all information in your blogs. Place bits of them in the product pages with links to the blogs. This can aid in the buying decisions and also make the pages more unique & help in search results.

User Reviews, Images & Videos:
User reviews add unique content to the site and is the top drivers of sales in site search results. Find ways to get the user to review the product. Offering an incentive works best. The first user to review can be rewarded with a discount on next purchase or enter the reviewers in to a contest with a cash prize for lucky winners. User submitted humorous/unique images & videos could help in organic visibility and social media engagements.

Forum & Live Chat:
In case of ecommerce sites selling only their own brand, a user’s forum could be a good idea where you relate to the buyer’s and answer their queries to influence their decisions. Though it is a humongous task to maintain, it will help in the search engine traffic if used in the right way. Live Chat could also be looked at as a way of helping your customer’s buying decisions.

Vijith Sivadasan

Written By Vijith Sivadasan

An enterprising visionary and a serial entrepreneur, Vijith is driven by instinct in his pursuit for creative excellence. Passionate about transformational marketing strategies, he enunciates the critical need of analytic skills to maximize business potential. To know more on how he can add value to your business, drop him a line at vijith@codelattice.com